The date that the Islamic monument of conquest is set to open: September 11, 2011.

More background on the Imam behind the planned shrine to Islam at Ground Zero, Imam Abdul Rauf. Alyssa Lappen over at PJM:

The prospective developer of a $100 million, 13-story mosque 600
feet from Ground Zero presents himself as a Muslim moderate(1). Yet Kuwait-born Faisal Abdul Rauf also boasts
of his issue from an “Egyptian family steeped in religious
scholarship” (2). Indeed, Feisal Rauf’s Muslim Brotherhood
provenance, radical by definition, is as authentic as it gets.

Rauf’s father, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Rauf (1917-2004) — an Egyptian
contemporary of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna — conveyed
to Feisal his family’s long tradition of radicalism, which he acquired at Islam’s
closest equivalent to the Vatican, Al-Azhar University. The elder Dr.
Rauf studied and taught there before fleeing Egypt in 1948. That year,
Feisal Abdul Rauf was born in Kuwait.

Feisal Rauf has planned for some time to further develop his
father’s U.S. Islamic expansionism. In 1990, Rauf opened the tiny
al-Farah Mosque at 245 West Broadway in lower Manhattan. Area residents
did not even notice the mosque until 2006, when the New York State
Liquor Authority (SLA) refused
to license a new bar on the same block and started yanking others’
liquor licenses (3).

Rauf attended grammar school and high school in the UK and Malaysia,
according to his biography. He probably first lived in America only in
1965, at age 17, when his father moved from Malaysia to New York to
plan and head the Islamic Cultural Center (not built until the mid-1980s)
(4). Rauf then obtained a BS in physics at Columbia
University (5). In 1971, the family moved to Washington, D.C.,
where Rauf’s father headed the Islamic Center on Massachusetts
Ave(6). His father, buried in Suitland, MD, at the for-profit
Washington National
Cemetery, also founded three Malaysian Islamic studies programs,
including the International Islamic University of Malaysia (7).

Rauf’s early UK education and familiarization with American popular
culture and values made him an acutely adept practitioner of Islamic taqiyya —
deceptive speech and action to advance the interests and supremacy of
Islam (8). To further that Islamic advancement, Rauf in 1997
established the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA). His
Kashmir-born wife Daisy Kahn, an
interior designer by profession, has run the organization since 2005 (9).

Rauf then began cultivating new spheres of influence. In about
summer 2002, Rauf started lecturing on Islam
at the 750-acre southwestern New York campus of Chautauqua Institution, a
136-year-old
non-profit where religion director Joan Brown Campbell took Rauf under
her wing. Under the rubric of the “Abrahamic” faiths,
a convenient cover for Rauf’s Islamic activities, Campbell
subsequently named him the prospective head of a Muslim house now
planned on campus by another Rauf brainchild — the 501(3)c organization
Muslim Friends of
Chautauqua. Rauf also befriended Karen Armstrong, the
former British nun and devotee of Islam.

In summer 2002, as a “theologian in residence,” Armstrong advocated
for the Muslim Brotherhood — as if the father of all Islamic terrorist
organizations was a progressive charity:

[The MB] set up a wonderful welfare program before it
was suppressed. … Factories where Muslims could work, had time for
prayers, had vacation time, insurance, [learned] labor laws, [provided]
clinics, they taught people how to treat sewage, drainage, and it was
always the religions response to try to help modernity to give to the
ordinary people the benefits of modernity in an Islamic setting that
made sense to them and made things more balanced (10).

In 2003, Rauf befriended leaders of Denver’s Aspen Institute,
including former executive director and four-term Aspen mayor John S. Bennet.
In 2004, under ASMA auspices, Rauf organized a meeting of 125 young
Muslims and formed Muslim
Leaders of Tomorrow. With Bennet’s help, he co-founded the Cordoba
Initiative in Aspen, purportedly to “improve” Muslim-West relations (11). Rauf gets funding from a
variety of other liberal organizations, including, for example, Gloria
Steinem’s Ms.
Foundation.

However, Rauf directly contradicted his conciliatory behavior with a
firebrand interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.
Terrorism, he stated, will end only when the West acknowledges the harm
it has done to Muslims:

The West’s role during World War II was strictly defensive, and in
no way religious. Moreover, Rauf’s statements — which Daisy Kahn glossed over in a
December 2009 Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham — ignored Islam’s
continuous attacks, from the 7th to 16th centuries, on non-Muslim
peoples throughout the Mideast, Africa, Europe, central Asia, and India (12). Rauf further reflected his antagonistic
sentiments in the 2006 Copenhagen gathering he organized for the Muslim
Leaders of Tomorrow. To enhance his moderate cloak, Rauf invited such liberal Muslims as Irshad Manji and Mona Eltahawy. However
Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow also includes radicals like Yasir Qadhi, a favorite
speaker at conferences of the Muslim Brotherhood’s
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Dhaba “Debbie” Almontasser, who works closely
with Hamas’ U.S. arm — the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), itself an unindicted co-conspirator
in terror financing.

The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent
civilians. … It was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in
Dresden
and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets (12).

Rauf further revealed his antagonistic sentiments in the 2006
Copenhagen gathering he organized for the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow.
To enhance his moderate cloak, Rauf invited such liberal Muslims as Irshad Manji
and Mona
Eltahawy. But he also hosted radicals like Yasir
Qadhi — a favorite speaker at conferences of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s Islamic Society of North America (ISNA),
among others.

Perhaps Rauf founded the Cordoba Initiative in 2004 intending to
build a mosque in downtown Manhattan directly across from Ground Zero.
However, Rauf tipped his hand to authorities only in April 2009, when
he incorporated the Cordoba Initiative in New York (13). Within months, in July
2009, he bought a future mosque site at 45 Park Place for $4.58
million in cash from the heirs to New York’s Pomerantz family.

As Islamic attacks on September 11, 2001, destroyed the World Trade
Center towers, falling jet debris simultaneously crushed the five-story
1923 structure some 600 feet away that until that morning housed a
robust Burlington Coat Factory store (14). Over the ruin of the former retail outlet,
Rauf now plans to build a 13-story, $100
million mosque. Rauf says the Cordoba Initiative bought the former
retail building to prove to the world that Islam is not a violent
faith (14).

Imam Rauf says that New York Muslims provided nearly $5 million in
cash to buy the Park Place building (16). Yet in fiscal 2009, Rauf’s ASMA received large
international donations. In the year ended June 30, 2009 — days before
Feisal closed the purchase — ASMA received at least $1.3 million. The
largest donation, $576,312, came from Qatar (17). That Persian Gulf nation has long harbored terror
financiers, and even the government stands accused of
funding international terrorism. Qatar also has, for decades, hosted
Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The elderly
sheikh, a large and founding shareholder
in the terror-financing al-Taqwa Bank,
champions sharia law, wife beating, and suicide
bombing.

ASMA also received $481,942 from Holland’s Millennial Development
Goals Fund (MDG3),
$144,752 from New York’s Carnegie
Corporation, $53,664 from the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), plus donations from the
Rockefeller Brothers and Hunt Alternatives funds, among others (18). The Ground Zero mosque plan is more than a
little reminiscent of a program initiated by Rauf’s late father in 1965.
That year, Muhammad R. Abdul Rauf moved to New York to plan and head a
huge Islamic Cultural Center that took decades
to realize (19). He bought prime Manhattan real estate at 96th
St. and 3rd Ave — roughly two thirds of a city block — apparently with
$1.3
million in funding from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. The late
Rauf long retained some of that land in a personal trust (19). But when construction started on the $17
million mosque in
1984, it had received funding from 46
Islamic nations. By 2010, the enormous Islamic complex had added
another two buildings. Since 1984, its founders-envisioned apartment
unit has been restricted to Muslims alone (20). Whenever Feisal first considered building a
mosque across from Ground Zero, he had the idea firmly in mind by 2004,
when he wrote What’s Right with Islam. The book was translated
into many languages. In Indonesia’s Bahasa, its title translates as “The
Call from the WTC Rubble.” Rauf promoted the book in December
2007 at a Kuala Lumpur gathering of Hizb
ut Tahrir(20) — an organization banned
in Germany since 2003, and also outlawed in Jordan, Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, among other places —
and ideologically akin to the MB. Both seek to replace the U.S.
Constitution with Islamic law (sharia), and eventually impose Islam and
sharia law worldwide. Most North American MB organizations avoid
widely publicizing that aim. The HT however, at a July 2009 Khalifah
conference at a suburban Chicago Hilton, openly promised to replace capitalism
with Islam and sharia law (21).

Feisal Rauf supports sharia law, too.

Described in one Asian report as an Egyptian citizen living in the
U.S., he has repeatedly stated, and writes in his 2004 book, that the
U.S. Constitution is sharia-complaint. The “American Constitution and
system of governance uphold the core principles of Islamic law,” Rauf
wrote in his book. The “American political structure is Shariah-complaint,”
he contends, since Muslim jurists over the centuries have “defined
five areas of life” to be protected by Islamic law — life, mind,
religion, property, and family. Only two further actions could render
the U.S. more Islamic than it is already, Rauf contends:

[Inviting] voices of all religions to join the dialogue
in shaping the nation’s practical life, [and allowing] religious
communities more leeway to judge among themselves according to their
own laws (22).

These assertions, however, merely fulfill the Muslim Brotherhood
doctrine of flexibility
— adapting to each and every environment
in which the brothers eventually hope to force Islamic law upon the
masses. Rauf’s claims starkly represent taqiyya, the Islamic
practice of deception, to further theocratic and essentially fascist
Islamic advances (23). And the additional “leeway” Rauf seeks for
intra-community religious-law enforcement is a thinly veiled attempt to
impose shariah more widely in the U.S., in direct contravention of the
U.S. Constitution.

President Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo challenged Muslims, as
Rauf wrote in a June
5, 2009Washington Post column (24): “Live up to the tenets of our religion,
embrace Shariah law as conceived by the Prophet, and see what
happens.” But sharia inhibits all kinds of freedoms, especially
those of women and non-Muslims. Islamic law protects only the
lives, minds, religion, property, and families of Muslims — not
all peoples of all faiths, as Rauf would have us believe (25). Since at least 2006, Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative
has partnered with the Gallup
Organization and “a team of Sunni
and Shi’a scholars from Morocco to Indonesia” to create “an
Islamic legal benchmark for measuring ‘Islamicity’ of a state” for use
by the public, pundits, “and state officials in both the Muslim and
Western worlds.” If the U.S. is so sharia-complaint, and Rauf so
strongly supports Western democracy and separation of mosque and state,
why has his U.S.-based institution initiated such a project? Funded by
Malaysia
and many other Muslim nations in the 57-member Organization of the
Islamic Conference (OIC), no less?

Rauf has often directly contradicted his seemingly tolerant and
peace-loving pronouncements with harsh, antagonistic assessments of the
U.S. In his May 7 Khutbah (Muslim sabbath sermon), delivered
at 1:00 p.m. at 45 Park Place in Manhattan, Rauf implied that Muslims
did not perpetrate 9/11 at all, according to writer Madeline Brooks, who
attended (26): “Some people say it was Muslims who attacked
on 9/11 … ” he stated, before trailing off into another topic.

He also expressed this view in an interview with 60 Minutes
aired on Sept.
30, 2001 as well (27):

The attacks were “a reaction against the U.S. government
politically, where we espouse principles of democracy and human
rights, [yet] … ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these
countries. … [U.S.] policies were an accessory to the crime that
happened.

Not the crimes Muslims committed: “the crime that happened.” He
continued:

In the Islamic belief system, the next life is the
primary life. The next life is
more real, more intense, and more vivid.

In short, Islam reveres death. Indeed, Islam orders its adherents to
conduct jihad warfare, and promises paradise and 72 virgins to those
who die in the service of Allah (29).

Even Cordoba Institute’s name telegraphs the organization’s
deceptiveness. Cordoba (also the name for Chautauqua’s proposed new
Muslim house) was the seat of the Islamic Caliphate that ruled most of
Spain from Tariq ibn Zayid’s 711 invasion through 1248, and controlled
parts of Spain until its full liberation in 1492. However, neither the
Umayyads (who ruled monolithically until about 1031), nor the
particularly vicious Almoravids (who swept over the Atlas mountains
and, in 1080, into Spain) ruled non-Muslims kindly. While Islamic
harshness varied, it remained unquestionably ever-present.

Rauf is not alone in his blatant whitewash of Islam’s brutal history
in Spain. Many others purvey the same historical falsehood. Yet Muslim
rule in Spain never remotely approached the mythic level of
beneficence that Rauf pretends (30).

The surviving victims of 9/11 and families of the deceased should
not be alone in opposing Rauf’s proposed 13-story mosque, 600 feet from
the World Trade Center site. Traditionally, Muslims have destroyed
houses of worship built by virtually every other faith under the sun.
Worldwide, Islam has plundered tens of thousands (if not more) of
Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and holy archaeological sites,
plus Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Sikh, and other temples and
monasteries. Then, in the interest of jihad, Islam has claimed all
these religious places of others as their own “mosques,” forever
Muslim.

To allow a mosque at a place a Muslim gang destroyed on 9/11 would
amount to formally blessing Islam’s 1,400-year-old tradition of
exclusivity and suppression of all persons of all other faiths. It
would be a 100% victory of Islam and sharia law over the U.S.
Constitution and America’s time-honored democracy and pluralism.

Comments

The date that the Islamic monument of conquest is set to open: September 11, 2011.

More background on the Imam behind the planned shrine to Islam at Ground Zero, Imam Abdul Rauf. Alyssa Lappen over at PJM:

The prospective developer of a $100 million, 13-story mosque 600
feet from Ground Zero presents himself as a Muslim moderate(1). Yet Kuwait-born Faisal Abdul Rauf also boasts
of his issue from an “Egyptian family steeped in religious
scholarship” (2). Indeed, Feisal Rauf’s Muslim Brotherhood
provenance, radical by definition, is as authentic as it gets.

Rauf’s father, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Rauf (1917-2004) — an Egyptian
contemporary of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna — conveyed
to Feisal his family’s long tradition of radicalism, which he acquired at Islam’s
closest equivalent to the Vatican, Al-Azhar University. The elder Dr.
Rauf studied and taught there before fleeing Egypt in 1948. That year,
Feisal Abdul Rauf was born in Kuwait.

Feisal Rauf has planned for some time to further develop his
father’s U.S. Islamic expansionism. In 1990, Rauf opened the tiny
al-Farah Mosque at 245 West Broadway in lower Manhattan. Area residents
did not even notice the mosque until 2006, when the New York State
Liquor Authority (SLA) refused
to license a new bar on the same block and started yanking others’
liquor licenses (3).

Rauf attended grammar school and high school in the UK and Malaysia,
according to his biography. He probably first lived in America only in
1965, at age 17, when his father moved from Malaysia to New York to
plan and head the Islamic Cultural Center (not built until the mid-1980s)
(4). Rauf then obtained a BS in physics at Columbia
University (5). In 1971, the family moved to Washington, D.C.,
where Rauf’s father headed the Islamic Center on Massachusetts
Ave(6). His father, buried in Suitland, MD, at the for-profit
Washington National
Cemetery, also founded three Malaysian Islamic studies programs,
including the International Islamic University of Malaysia (7).

Rauf’s early UK education and familiarization with American popular
culture and values made him an acutely adept practitioner of Islamic taqiyya —
deceptive speech and action to advance the interests and supremacy of
Islam (8). To further that Islamic advancement, Rauf in 1997
established the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA). His
Kashmir-born wife Daisy Kahn, an
interior designer by profession, has run the organization since 2005 (9).

Rauf then began cultivating new spheres of influence. In about
summer 2002, Rauf started lecturing on Islam
at the 750-acre southwestern New York campus of Chautauqua Institution, a
136-year-old
non-profit where religion director Joan Brown Campbell took Rauf under
her wing. Under the rubric of the “Abrahamic” faiths,
a convenient cover for Rauf’s Islamic activities, Campbell
subsequently named him the prospective head of a Muslim house now
planned on campus by another Rauf brainchild — the 501(3)c organization
Muslim Friends of
Chautauqua. Rauf also befriended Karen Armstrong, the
former British nun and devotee of Islam.

In summer 2002, as a “theologian in residence,” Armstrong advocated
for the Muslim Brotherhood — as if the father of all Islamic terrorist
organizations was a progressive charity:

[The MB] set up a wonderful welfare program before it
was suppressed. … Factories where Muslims could work, had time for
prayers, had vacation time, insurance, [learned] labor laws, [provided]
clinics, they taught people how to treat sewage, drainage, and it was
always the religions response to try to help modernity to give to the
ordinary people the benefits of modernity in an Islamic setting that
made sense to them and made things more balanced (10).

In 2003, Rauf befriended leaders of Denver’s Aspen Institute,
including former executive director and four-term Aspen mayor John S. Bennet.
In 2004, under ASMA auspices, Rauf organized a meeting of 125 young
Muslims and formed Muslim
Leaders of Tomorrow. With Bennet’s help, he co-founded the Cordoba
Initiative in Aspen, purportedly to “improve” Muslim-West relations (11). Rauf gets funding from a
variety of other liberal organizations, including, for example, Gloria
Steinem’s Ms.
Foundation.

However, Rauf directly contradicted his conciliatory behavior with a
firebrand interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.
Terrorism, he stated, will end only when the West acknowledges the harm
it has done to Muslims:

The West’s role during World War II was strictly defensive, and in
no way religious. Moreover, Rauf’s statements — which Daisy Kahn glossed over in a
December 2009 Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham — ignored Islam’s
continuous attacks, from the 7th to 16th centuries, on non-Muslim
peoples throughout the Mideast, Africa, Europe, central Asia, and India (12). Rauf further reflected his antagonistic
sentiments in the 2006 Copenhagen gathering he organized for the Muslim
Leaders of Tomorrow. To enhance his moderate cloak, Rauf invited such liberal Muslims as Irshad Manji and Mona Eltahawy. However
Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow also includes radicals like Yasir Qadhi, a favorite
speaker at conferences of the Muslim Brotherhood’s
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Dhaba “Debbie” Almontasser, who works closely
with Hamas’ U.S. arm — the
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), itself an unindicted co-conspirator
in terror financing.

The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent
civilians. … It was Christians in World War II who bombed civilians in
Dresden
and Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets (12).

Rauf further revealed his antagonistic sentiments in the 2006
Copenhagen gathering he organized for the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow.
To enhance his moderate cloak, Rauf invited such liberal Muslims as Irshad Manji
and Mona
Eltahawy. But he also hosted radicals like Yasir
Qadhi — a favorite speaker at conferences of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s Islamic Society of North America (ISNA),
among others.

Perhaps Rauf founded the Cordoba Initiative in 2004 intending to
build a mosque in downtown Manhattan directly across from Ground Zero.
However, Rauf tipped his hand to authorities only in April 2009, when
he incorporated the Cordoba Initiative in New York (13). Within months, in July
2009, he bought a future mosque site at 45 Park Place for $4.58
million in cash from the heirs to New York’s Pomerantz family.

As Islamic attacks on September 11, 2001, destroyed the World Trade
Center towers, falling jet debris simultaneously crushed the five-story
1923 structure some 600 feet away that until that morning housed a
robust Burlington Coat Factory store (14). Over the ruin of the former retail outlet,
Rauf now plans to build a 13-story, $100
million mosque. Rauf says the Cordoba Initiative bought the former
retail building to prove to the world that Islam is not a violent
faith (14).

Imam Rauf says that New York Muslims provided nearly $5 million in
cash to buy the Park Place building (16). Yet in fiscal 2009, Rauf’s ASMA received large
international donations. In the year ended June 30, 2009 — days before
Feisal closed the purchase — ASMA received at least $1.3 million. The
largest donation, $576,312, came from Qatar (17). That Persian Gulf nation has long harbored terror
financiers, and even the government stands accused of
funding international terrorism. Qatar also has, for decades, hosted
Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The elderly
sheikh, a large and founding shareholder
in the terror-financing al-Taqwa Bank,
champions sharia law, wife beating, and suicide
bombing.

ASMA also received $481,942 from Holland’s Millennial Development
Goals Fund (MDG3),
$144,752 from New York’s Carnegie
Corporation, $53,664 from the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), plus donations from the
Rockefeller Brothers and Hunt Alternatives funds, among others (18). The Ground Zero mosque plan is more than a
little reminiscent of a program initiated by Rauf’s late father in 1965.
That year, Muhammad R. Abdul Rauf moved to New York to plan and head a
huge Islamic Cultural Center that took decades
to realize (19). He bought prime Manhattan real estate at 96th
St. and 3rd Ave — roughly two thirds of a city block — apparently with
$1.3
million in funding from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. The late
Rauf long retained some of that land in a personal trust (19). But when construction started on the $17
million mosque in
1984, it had received funding from 46
Islamic nations. By 2010, the enormous Islamic complex had added
another two buildings. Since 1984, its founders-envisioned apartment
unit has been restricted to Muslims alone (20). Whenever Feisal first considered building a
mosque across from Ground Zero, he had the idea firmly in mind by 2004,
when he wrote What’s Right with Islam. The book was translated
into many languages. In Indonesia’s Bahasa, its title translates as “The
Call from the WTC Rubble.” Rauf promoted the book in December
2007 at a Kuala Lumpur gathering of Hizb
ut Tahrir(20) — an organization banned
in Germany since 2003, and also outlawed in Jordan, Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, among other places —
and ideologically akin to the MB. Both seek to replace the U.S.
Constitution with Islamic law (sharia), and eventually impose Islam and
sharia law worldwide. Most North American MB organizations avoid
widely publicizing that aim. The HT however, at a July 2009 Khalifah
conference at a suburban Chicago Hilton, openly promised to replace capitalism
with Islam and sharia law (21).

Feisal Rauf supports sharia law, too.

Described in one Asian report as an Egyptian citizen living in the
U.S., he has repeatedly stated, and writes in his 2004 book, that the
U.S. Constitution is sharia-complaint. The “American Constitution and
system of governance uphold the core principles of Islamic law,” Rauf
wrote in his book. The “American political structure is Shariah-complaint,”
he contends, since Muslim jurists over the centuries have “defined
five areas of life” to be protected by Islamic law — life, mind,
religion, property, and family. Only two further actions could render
the U.S. more Islamic than it is already, Rauf contends:

[Inviting] voices of all religions to join the dialogue
in shaping the nation’s practical life, [and allowing] religious
communities more leeway to judge among themselves according to their
own laws (22).

These assertions, however, merely fulfill the Muslim Brotherhood
doctrine of flexibility
— adapting to each and every environment
in which the brothers eventually hope to force Islamic law upon the
masses. Rauf’s claims starkly represent taqiyya, the Islamic
practice of deception, to further theocratic and essentially fascist
Islamic advances (23). And the additional “leeway” Rauf seeks for
intra-community religious-law enforcement is a thinly veiled attempt to
impose shariah more widely in the U.S., in direct contravention of the
U.S. Constitution.

President Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo challenged Muslims, as
Rauf wrote in a June
5, 2009Washington Post column (24): “Live up to the tenets of our religion,
embrace Shariah law as conceived by the Prophet, and see what
happens.” But sharia inhibits all kinds of freedoms, especially
those of women and non-Muslims. Islamic law protects only the
lives, minds, religion, property, and families of Muslims — not
all peoples of all faiths, as Rauf would have us believe (25). Since at least 2006, Rauf’s Cordoba Initiative
has partnered with the Gallup
Organization and “a team of Sunni
and Shi’a scholars from Morocco to Indonesia” to create “an
Islamic legal benchmark for measuring ‘Islamicity’ of a state” for use
by the public, pundits, “and state officials in both the Muslim and
Western worlds.” If the U.S. is so sharia-complaint, and Rauf so
strongly supports Western democracy and separation of mosque and state,
why has his U.S.-based institution initiated such a project? Funded by
Malaysia
and many other Muslim nations in the 57-member Organization of the
Islamic Conference (OIC), no less?

Rauf has often directly contradicted his seemingly tolerant and
peace-loving pronouncements with harsh, antagonistic assessments of the
U.S. In his May 7 Khutbah (Muslim sabbath sermon), delivered
at 1:00 p.m. at 45 Park Place in Manhattan, Rauf implied that Muslims
did not perpetrate 9/11 at all, according to writer Madeline Brooks, who
attended (26): “Some people say it was Muslims who attacked
on 9/11 … ” he stated, before trailing off into another topic.

He also expressed this view in an interview with 60 Minutes
aired on Sept.
30, 2001 as well (27):

The attacks were “a reaction against the U.S. government
politically, where we espouse principles of democracy and human
rights, [yet] … ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these
countries. … [U.S.] policies were an accessory to the crime that
happened.

Not the crimes Muslims committed: “the crime that happened.” He
continued:

In the Islamic belief system, the next life is the
primary life. The next life is
more real, more intense, and more vivid.

In short, Islam reveres death. Indeed, Islam orders its adherents to
conduct jihad warfare, and promises paradise and 72 virgins to those
who die in the service of Allah (29).

Even Cordoba Institute’s name telegraphs the organization’s
deceptiveness. Cordoba (also the name for Chautauqua’s proposed new
Muslim house) was the seat of the Islamic Caliphate that ruled most of
Spain from Tariq ibn Zayid’s 711 invasion through 1248, and controlled
parts of Spain until its full liberation in 1492. However, neither the
Umayyads (who ruled monolithically until about 1031), nor the
particularly vicious Almoravids (who swept over the Atlas mountains
and, in 1080, into Spain) ruled non-Muslims kindly. While Islamic
harshness varied, it remained unquestionably ever-present.

Rauf is not alone in his blatant whitewash of Islam’s brutal history
in Spain. Many others purvey the same historical falsehood. Yet Muslim
rule in Spain never remotely approached the mythic level of
beneficence that Rauf pretends (30).

The surviving victims of 9/11 and families of the deceased should
not be alone in opposing Rauf’s proposed 13-story mosque, 600 feet from
the World Trade Center site. Traditionally, Muslims have destroyed
houses of worship built by virtually every other faith under the sun.
Worldwide, Islam has plundered tens of thousands (if not more) of
Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and holy archaeological sites,
plus Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Sikh, and other temples and
monasteries. Then, in the interest of jihad, Islam has claimed all
these religious places of others as their own “mosques,” forever
Muslim.

To allow a mosque at a place a Muslim gang destroyed on 9/11 would
amount to formally blessing Islam’s 1,400-year-old tradition of
exclusivity and suppression of all persons of all other faiths. It
would be a 100% victory of Islam and sharia law over the U.S.
Constitution and America’s time-honored democracy and pluralism.